I set out to actively lead a life that truly feels good in the Spring of 2008 after a series of setbacks in my personal life. My aim is to spread whatever I learn about feeling good to others through this blog.
Have You Discovered Your Life Purpose Yet?
Earlier this week I discussed reasons why we’ll never get everything we want in life and that got me to thinking about the big purpose in life that most of us are looking for. If you have a strong enough purpose you’re sure to succeed in life right? If you know exactly what your purpose is then great, you can skip this post but I suspect many of you haven’t found it yet - I haven’t!
Dreams, Goals & Desires & Life Purpose
Most humans (Buddhists are notable exceptions!) go through life expressing desires. As Esther Hicks (Abraham) says, the contrast (what feels good, what doesn’t) in our life experiences give birth to rockets of desire for the things we want to do, be or have. Often these desires start out as fairly vague dreams but then they become stronger and turn into desires, and some of us set goals for their achievement.
How does a life purpose fit into all this? I suppose this is another one of those phrases that could been different things to different people but I see it as one of two things: (1) a very specific but usually very major goal that is expected to take up the most of one’s life, and (2) a way of living or life ethic that guides one’s whole life.
If you think of a goal such as “I want to buy a home”, that is not a life purpose because it is not going to take up the rest of your life, you hope! A goal such as “end world hunger” or “cure cancer” may well become a life purpose as it is unlikely to be achieved within a few years. These are examples of a life purpose that fits into the first category.
The second category is more a lifestyle choice. Steve Pavlina has written about finding purpose in some depth and here is how he defines his purpose:
to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.
That was written in 2005, he may have updated it since then but it serves as a good example. No matter what Steve does in his life, he can always find a way to live out his purpose. It is a purpose that does not have an end point, it cannot be completed.
Finding Your Life’s Purpose
I know that when I read that article, I tried Steve’s excercise for finding your lifes purpose in 20 minutes and I did come up with something but I wasn’t quite happy with it. That was quite a few years ago and I have thought about it a great many times since then and I have never come up with something that satisfied me and here’s why:
No matter what I came up with, I looked at it and asked myself if that would still be true when I was 50 or 70 or 90 even and I honestly didn’t know. When I look back over my life in just the last few years I have changed so much as a person that I do not recognise myself. When I wrote the first few posts in my story series it felt as though I was writing about somebody else. Because of this, I now feel like I am always changing and so I honestly have no clue what I will be like 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now.
I could come up with a purpose that would suit me now and I could probably see myself in 5 years at a push with that purpose but not much further than that. That’s why I couldn’t come up with anything that deeply satisfied me.
Will You Change Or Not?
I know that there are some people who do not seem to change like I have. Steve Pavlina is one of them. He underwent a transformation in his early life (about aged 20 I think) and since then he has transformed his life and now has an utterly clear vision for how he wants to live his life from this day forth until he dies. However I think that Steve is an exception.
I think that most of us are still learning about ourselves, we’re feeling our way through life, discovering things about ourselves and the world around us. Not only that but we naturally change as we get older. In a recent post I talked about the fear of change and explained that life tends to operate in phases and that we change as people as we move through these phases.
Your Purpose Changes With You
It seems perfectly logical to me that a 20 year old would have a very different vision of life than a 40 year old and again both would see things very differently to a 70 year old but this is not just about age. There is often a change in personality that occurrs due to some negative event in life that causes people to have some kind of “wake up call”. This kind of thing can lead to a radical shift in thinking and in dreams, desires and of course what one would consider to be a life purpose.
For now, I have abandoned the idea of seeking a purpose that will span my whole life. I have some ideas for how I want to live that should stay with me forever but they are more in the background and I wouldn’t consider them to be a purpose as such.
It’s quite reasonable for somebody to have a strong purpose that they pursue with a passion for many years and then it changes some years later. This is what happened to me. From the age of 11 I got hooked on computers and wanted to be a computer programmer. I realised that dream in adulthood and when I got my career back after having lost it some years earlier I started thinking in terms of life purpose and it revolved around software but something about that just didn’t feel right and now I know it’s because the very idea of software was just waning for me anyway but I didn’t know it at the time.
I’m quite sure that my personality and the desires and goals that go with that will shift over the years so now I just go with the flow. I have given up trying to find some purpose that I am supposed to pursue for the rest of my life. Instead I just try to life a life that feels good and see where that takes me.
If you’re still looking for your purpose though, you might find these questions from Think Simple Now to be useful. Even if you don’t find a purpose that fits your whole life, you might discover a lot about yourself.
Stumble it!
Sal
September 3, 2008
If you get a chance take a read at Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life. It is pretty good. As far as my purpose, I am still working on that. I have a general idea, but no real plan to see it realized yet. I think that is the biggest thing. We all know, either conciously or subconciously what our purpose is, life is just about trying to figure out how to make it happen.
Sals last blog post..What do you know?